Shock. So she grabbed his map bag strap and got a good handful of his ammo rope too, hauled him up, glanced at the scared, big-eyed Federal Army kid pinioning his commanding officer’s arms, and slapped the sarge briskly, twice.
That brought him back, and the plasco-norpirene finished setting, turning milky white. She already had her last trauma tag out and was scribbling on it with a grease pencil filched from a med station two days ago. “You!” She pointed at the kid holding him down. “Get him back to the aid station!”
That meant the striper on her left was squad command now. She glanced at that big piece of Federal muscle, who jerked his chin at the kid and began to curse the few men who were now his problem back together. When the sleds stopped pouring on the cannos, it would be these guys sweeping the wreckage over the ridgetop, and if there was anything resembling resistance, well, she’d deal with those casualties when they happened. Right now her job was to keep moving, patching up whoever could be returned to the firing line or dragged back to the aid station.
Firing on the left. More mortars and cannos landing, throwing up plumes of dirt, shrapnel singing and slicing. There were no longer separate incidents, just flashes—bloody, unshaven faces; another squad commander with her lower half blown off, still trying to push herself upright, not understanding she was done. Broken legs, a dislocated shoulder Lara set with a quick crunching sound, a swallow of burning-icy liquor from a corporal’s flask while they cowered in another shell hole, the world shaking and shuddering and throwing up clods of dirt all around them. Screaming for mother or sweetheart or God knew who, the wet gray slithering of intestines and the sudden word passed down the comm channels that there are goddamn mines, get those fucking engineers strapped in now!
Through the smoke she glimpsed a familiar shape—a flicker of a bald, egg-pale head usually covered by a rancid, battered hat. She dove for cover inside a moss-grown, abandoned concrete culvert, coming to rest right next to Swann’s lanky length. The raider captain’s eyes were half closed; he plugged his other ear as he listened through his comm handset. He spared Lara a single nod. She realized her entire right side was a bar of pain and her lungs were full of heaviness. Her breath came in heaves, and she was, as usual, mildly surprised she wasn’t bleeding, too.
Going up the interstate would have been easier instead of slogging through the bands of wastewood, but the Firsters had sleds too. Not nearly as many as the Federals, though. The goddamn Patriots were running out of all sorts of things. DC was still sieged, but plenty of the Northeast had just been waiting to get rid of the Firsters and were taking to the streets now that there looked like a chance of the Federals reaching the Atlantic somewhere, anywhere. Most of the grunts rolled their eyes and said, Once we take DC we can leave the fucking South alone. Build that fucking wall the Firsters was always on about.
They had a point.
Swann bellowed into his handset again; Lara laced her fingers over her head and crouched, pressing her back against the culvert’s damp wall. Her too-big boots sloshed in sulfur-smelling groundwater, she ached all over, and her clothes could probably stand up without her in them.
Nobody in range was screaming medic. And since she’d happened across Swann alone, she had to stay attached to him just in case. Simmons and Zampana were out on the field, Chuck Dogg was back at CP, the rest of them were attached to different companies, and the explosions around them reached a crescendo.
Lara shut her eyes.
Then, all of a sudden, the artillery stopped, replaced by pops and pings of rifles. Swann was still yelling into the handset, giving coordinates and cussing out whoever was on the other end for good measure. It was Prinky, the lazy-lidded, foul-mouthed, sniper-sharp motherfucker, and Swann was swearing because redheaded Prink had just told him it wasn’t a local counterattack but a whole mess of trouble up over the damn ridge.
Swann’s piercing hazel gaze rested on Lara, just the way it would have on a chair or a gun or a table. She peered through her lashes every few seconds, checking to see if he had an order for her, but each time he just shook his head slightly, his stubbled jaw set and his hat looking even sorrier than usual because it had been shot right off his damn head in the ruckus, clamped back on once the shelling quit. He was a lucky-ass fucker, and liked to say Napoleon would have made him a general.
That little French fuck liked lucky bastards, and you’re looking at one.
“All right, you sonofabitch. Look for me on the other fucking side.” He toggled the chopswitch and let out a long breath; Lara let go of her head and rocked on her haunches a little. He stuffed the waterproof map back into its case, clamped his hat more firmly on his shaven head, and nodded at her. “Get your iron out, medic. We’re going over the top.”
Well, that’s not so bad. She nodded, chin dipping sharply, and her hand found the sidearm Zampana had stolen for her. There was no shortage of clips, not since they’d found the ammo dump. The Firsters, pulling back in a hurry, hadn’t even wired it to blow, though there had been one or two hairy moments in the barn, the engineers freezing and anyone with any sense doing the same. It wasn’t until after that particular engagement that the booby traps started to get serious, the engineers requisitioning raider sweepers to pool experience once the shooting stopped. It was a far cry from Federals turning their noses up at irregulars, that was for damn sure. And medics were always welcome.
Right now, though, the hill had to be taken. Lara was raider first and medic a distant second.
“We got ’em on the run now,” Swann said, more prayer than fact. But he whistled, a short sharp note, and all she had to do was keep up with him as they bolted, both hunched even though the mortars and cannos had stopped, up the slope.
Chapter Seven
Skinny-Ass Impossible
April 15, ’98
There were still bodies on the gallows, swaying gently under a smoke-choked breeze. “Jesus Christ,” Simmons said, rubbing a hand over his stiff blond buzz cut. “How do they have anyone left, they keep this shit up?”
“Indoctrination.” Zampana’s broad face, set with disgust, had turned ashen. “No birth control.” Her hands were fists, skinned knuckles glaring. “Incentivize that Quiverfull shit.”
“That was rhetorical, Pana.” But Chuck said it quietly. You never wanted to fuck up another raider’s way of coping, and Zampana’s was to lecture. She was the one who had remarked that morning that it was tax day, at least on the Federal side of the line.
Charred, shattered wooden frames marched side by side down a long, dusty central street. The roll-call square was packed dirt, and the entire place smelled like sap and roasted pork. Along the south edge of the camp, just outside an electrified fence, was a long hand-dug trench, the dirt mound over it exhaling an evil stench of gasoline and rot. You’d think after Gloria few soldiers would ever be nauseous again, but you’d be wrong. Even the older grunts were tossing their cookies on this one. By unspoken agreement, you went back to the truck when you needed a few minutes to get the smell out of your nose. Even the diesel fume in the back of an unaltered or hybrid truck was better than the aroma of…cooking meat.
It smelled just like a cookout.
The new medic stood with her head down, rocking back on her heels every once in a while as Swann gazed at the only unburned structure. Painted white and standing prissily apart from the shattered barracks, the administration building even had boxes holding leafy green plants under its largely unbroken windows. A bristling cellular tower jutted from its roof, and its front door was thrown open. Charlie Company’s Bravo squad had just cleared it, with Prink in their midst checking for booby traps. The worms were already running inside the ancient mainframe this camp held, and the data recovery boys from CentCom were a few hours behind the leading edge. There would be precious little way of figuring out who had died here unless some of the other kamps in this one’s network could be captured with data intact.
Prink was doing his best to slow the worms down, but it was a than
kless task with the old, overworked laptop he’d managed to scrounge. The thing didn’t even have a thumbprint port, for God’s sake.
A hastily painted sign leaned against the gallows. TRAITORS, it shouted in large white block letters. One of the hanging bodies wore a Patriot’s winter uniform, black wool, red-and-white piping. The faces weren’t too swollen yet—winter still had its grip on the Missouri pinewoods. The guard’s small, hard potbelly looked pregnant next to the skin-and-bones rags of prisoners in their tattered orange coveralls. One of the prisoners was hooded. The other two stared, dead gazes moving across the roll-call square somberly, with all the time in the world.
So many of the dead lay with their eyes open. They couldn’t look away either.
Lara’s head jerked up. What little color had come back into her thin cheeks drained away. She staggered sideways and elbowed Swann hard enough a huff escaped his lungs. “What the fu—” he began, but she took off, pelting toward the white clapboard house.
“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out now! NOW!”
She hit the front steps—painted green, muddied by the platoon’s tracking back and forth—with a clatter of her scavenged, too-big boots, and threw herself inside.
Simmons had dropped to one knee, his rifle tracking; Zampana’s sidearm was out; and most of Charlie Company began cussing and scrambling, grabbing weapons and looking for the cause of the disturbance.
Not eight seconds later, Prink catapulted out of the house and flew off the front steps, landing so hard he almost lost a tooth in the dusty gravel. Behind him came the new medic, and while she was airborne there was a breathless wump as a timed shell tucked in a rusting file cabinet moored in the damp cellar—there were two inches of standing water down there, and the cabinet had looked unassuming enough—exploded.
Lara landed on redheaded Prinky, glass shattering and wood turning to deadly splinters where it hadn’t vaporized. The shock wave rolled over both of them, pushed the hanging bodies into fresh, gentle motion. The gallows creaked and moaned, but didn’t break—quality construction. The gallows’ steps were mined too, as Prinky found later when his ears had stopped ringing.
Simmons was the first there, grabbing the back of the medic’s too-big camo coat and picking her up just like a suitcase. Zampana, hard on his heels, got Prinky by his belt and, truth be told, a handful of his hair, since he wouldn’t cut the coppery mop, and hauled him back toward the truck, his heels cutting long furrows in gravel and dust.
Miraculously, neither of them were dead, just temporarily deafened. Charlie Company’s captain, Brian Crunche—his real actual no-foolin’ name—escaped a Swann-size bollocking only because Prinky was already swearing at himself up one side and down the other for assuming the rusted file cabinet wasn’t backtrapped and just checking its front. Wisely, everyone else kept their mouths shut except to congratulate him on his escape, and to ask if the new medic was okay.
I still ain’t sure what happened, Prinky told Swann that night, once they’d made it back to the temporary base at the edge of the scar cut in the pinewoods. There was even a shower courtesy of the antique, underfunded Parks and Rec Division and a highway ribboning through, a rest stop plus parking lot of Great Historical Interest. Now, of course, it was full of Federals in canvas camo and a few more of Swann’s Riders—Sal the Greek, Lazy Eye, and Minjae had been attached to Thirtieth Battalion and were glad as fuck to see their own folk again. Allasudden she comes in, grabs me by my scruff—how can a skinny-ass girl like that pick me up and throw me? It ain’t natural.
Swann merely grunted and clapped him on the shoulder, telling Prinky he was a lucky fuck and that he’d seen all sorts of skinny asses do the impossible under fire. And when Lara showed up damp from the cold showers, shivering but much cleaner, space was made for her at the Riders’ fire pit. Zampana handed her a hot MRE, and Prinky, still rubbing at his ears, asked her for a smoke.
She gave him a battered Camel, from another pack scrounged somewhere by Chuck Dogg.
“Thanks, Spooky Girl,” Prink said, and the name stuck.
Chapter Eight
Light It Up
The advance bogged down after that, a thaw coming in and softening the ground. Mud, mud, more mud, and nobody complained when CentCom held them static for a while. They dug in where the glop wasn’t too bad, fortified what they could of the park’s buildings, and avoided what they took to calling “the burning camp” unless they absolutely had to patrol it. The persistent grumbling of artillery to the south- and northeast, accompanied by flashes, was just loud enough to remind you to be grateful you’d been pulled back, and sorry for the poor sonsabitches who were up to their asses in mud, blood, and shells now. There was even mail for the Federals, and the news that Villarosa had taken Waco and hung that bastard Governor Gabranch was greeted with cheers and the breaking out of much engine degreaser. Nobody liked losing chunks of Texas to Mexico, but given what the Lone Star State had inflicted on the rest of America, there were some who called it justice. Besides, nobody needed the oil much anymore. Kerros and gleeson tech had taken care of it, and some said McCoombs’s first mistake was deciding he could middle-finger the petro lobby in the middle of the war.
They may have been dying dinosaurs, but they were dying, well-connected, rich dinosaurs.
It took a war to get people to care about the goddamn news, Swann remarked sourly, but nobody paid much attention. It was the raiders who went out on recon, slogging through the sludge and finding nothing but deer, feral dogs, porcupines, and two more mass graves, each a mile and a half from the still-smoking prison camp.
Not a single one of Swann’s complained, because it was left to the Federals to haul the bodies out of the torched barracks and bury them properly, not to mention dealing with the other stinking, bubbling pits. The corpses on the gallows were cut down, buried, and spoken over after the mines were disabled.
Except for the guard. That black-clad body they left swinging. Even the crows and buzzards wouldn’t touch that motherfucker.
Sal the Greek, squat and handsome, even figured out a way to jury-rig some heat, so the showers in the cement-walled rest stop were tepid instead of freezing. If the Federals weren’t glad of Swann’s crew before, they were now, and even more so when Chuck and Minjae brought back a gutted deer or two. Fifth Medical showed up with the mail, and when they left, Lara and Zampana both had full medic kits instead of just odds and ends.
Captain Crunche got orders the day after Fifth Medical left. “Son of a bitch,” he said, wrinkling his long Gallic nose. He looked perpetually sleepless, rings under his muddy brown eyes and his mouth bitter even while he smiled. “They’re pushing on DC.” The command tent, its sides open to get air to move through and dry everything out, made a flapping, disconsolate noise. “But we don’t get none of that.”
Swann scratched under his hat band, accepting the scrap of hotpaper. “It’s the river for us, then. Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“At least we can get across Ole Miss.” Lieutenant Azer, her blonde buzzcut glinting in the sun through the tent flap, didn’t sound like that was a reason for optimism. “Tell me we’re getting our battery back.”
“They’re already on the bank, waiting for our happy asses.” Crunche, if it was possible, sounded even more doleful.
“I hate the fucking South.” Swann glared at the hotpaper before passing it to Azer, who read it with her eyebrows drawn together, her scraped knuckles a little swollen. She’d just broken up a fight between two squads that morning, an altercation fueled by too much hot-still booze and not enough work to keep the men busy. Everyone was getting antsy, even those with enough sense to be happy for the rest and semirelaxation.
Crunche rolled his head and his shoulders, dispelling a persistent ache. “Yeah, well. You get three guesses where we’re going after the Miss.”
A silence full of rustling and the faraway groan of artillery brimmed over. Azer crumpled the hotpaper, closing it in her fist. Body heat would activate the rest of the co
ating; sweat would help turn it into an unintelligible mess of paper fibers. You could tell an experienced officer by what they did with flimsies. There were stories of some noncoms who ate the particularly sensitive ones.
Needless to say, the result was often constipation. But really, that was a perennial risk, and motherfuckers with a few stripes or straps were likely to be cranky even if they escaped such a fate.
Crunche was really a decent sort. “It’s Memphis,” he said finally, scratching alongside his blurred, bulbous nose. “I understand if your folk don’t want to.”
Swann appeared to think this over. His thumbs hooked in his belt, his eyes narrowed, and his right boot pressing its toe into the ground just a little, then easing up, he stared at the map table and the comms bench beyond it. An oscillating pattern on the secondary screen showed there was no incoming, and the hunched back of the comms operator was bisected by the line of a map bag that probably held a photograph or two of loved ones. The operator, her shoulders curved forward and the headphones giving her giant ears, couldn’t hear a damn thing.
Still…
“Memphis,” Swann said heavily. His chin dipped a little, and the brim of that verminous hat of his flopped a little in the freshening breeze. “Be a pleasure to see that sonofabitchin’ place shot to shit.”
“Well, we’re gonna light it up.” Azer had no respect for a sentimental moment, which was why she was Crunche’s second-in-command. “We head out at 0500 tomorrow.”
Swann actually unbent enough to clap Crunche on the shoulder, a light, glancing blow that nonetheless left a two-week bruise on the good captain’s deltoid. “Memphis or bust,” he said, and furthermore snapped Crunche a salute before turning on his heel and striding away. At least he waited until he was a good ten paces from the tent to bellow for Zampana, which made everyone in the damn bivouac pretty much guess something was afoot and their rest behind the lines was goddamn well over.